Practical application of integrated failure and decision analysis for maintenance and reliability improvement

Several manufacturing and servicing industries spend huge sums of money on the acquisition and installation of different kinds of advanced computerised maintenance management systems (CMMS) including advanced downtime analysis program (ADAP), Maximo, Lotus notes work order system (LNWOS), etc. Practical experience has shown that a significant number of these CMMS are often used for monitoring contract requirements and less for the enhancement of maintenance decisions such as the establishment of sub-system reliabilities or the measurement of differing levels of asset performance so as to avert catastrophic failures. Through the application of a case study, the current paper proposes a maintenance model that could be useful for enhancing the decision making capability of reliability and maintenance engineers. The proposed model is a hybrid of failure modes effects and criticality analysis, fault tree analysis and analytical hierarchy process for multiple decision analysis. The practical applicability of the proposed integrated approach was then explored through a case study.